Thévenin acoustics.

Abstract

Thévenin's theorem is commonly used in the analysis of acoustic transducers to provide a simplified representation of a transducer or its environment. The method may be extended to the analyses of other acoustic systems, without limitation to systems that have been reduced to analogous circuit models, and is particularly convenient in the analysis of acoustic scattering when the scattering object is mobile. In this paper, the method is illustrated through an alternative derivation of the well-known "mass law" for transmission through a partition, and is also applied to the case of acoustic scattering from a rigid, mobile cylinder of arbitrary size in an ideal plane progressive wave. Differences between the conventional solution approach for such problems and the Thévenin-inspired method are discussed, along with the potential benefits of taking such an approach for the simplification of other problems in physical acoustics.